Re: Where will Olympia be in a year?

Greg Lindahl (gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU)
Mon, 10 Aug 92 15:23:03 -0400

On Aug 9, 20:46, Carl Edman wrote:

> That is a small addition and seems perfectly realistic.
> After all if you want to build a road from Chardia to West Habyn,
> you'll have to travel the whole distance.

It takes things like stone to construct a road, not to mention gold to
buy the tools. Putting a gold price on the activity not only sops up
extra cash (always useful), it makes it more likely that players will
cooperate on such public works, which is A Good Thing. It would also
put off the day when every link is a road, which will be here by
December, at this rate. About 1/6 of the 30 links in "my area" have
been built to roads in the last real-time month. How many months until
Christmas?

Indeed, putting in decay for roads would solve the problem. But I
suggested that a long time ago, Rich thought it was a great idea, and
he hasn't had time to implement it since. In addition, if roads are
cheap to build, they're going to be cheaper to maintain. No solution
there.

> As they should be. If you have wood, men and skill why should it cost
> you anything to build a boat.

Because ships require a lot of little metal pieces, outfitting,
rigging, sails, navigation equipment, and so on. All of these take
gold. A steeper cost is an easy way of getting the result now without
a lot of programming to introduce decay now. In addition, a gold cost
encourages people to build up shipbuilding enterprises and then build
ships for others for gold. This is A Good Thing that we'd like to
encourage, and you won't get that from decay. Right now there's no
need to sell a ship; you build one, you own it. No problem. Build
another. No problem. No interaction. No reason for players to
specialize. Zzzzz.

> I see few realistic possibilities of changing this now, but if
> Olympia is ever restarted, I think it would be a good idea to place a
> NPC as owner into every guild tower, and give him a medium size body
> guard. This NPC should have quite high skills (level 7-8) in his
> guilds base skill and also some skill in teaching.

Goodie! More magic GM units to persuade!

This form of guilds is still irrelevant to any players other than
newbies, and it doesn't erase the fact that the powerful players are
going to be involved in more than just one area of activity, be it
trade, military, or magic. You can't change that without drastically
changing Olympia.

I'd like to also predict that Rich's rather tame land ownership is
going to be much more of an effect on the game when implemented than
guilds are now, i.e. it's going to result in competition and
bloodshed. Which is also A Good Thing, it's boring to have the game
divided up into just the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. We want These
Guys who are annoyed at Those Guys because Those Guys tried to muscle
into These Guy's territory. Unfortunately, this vision of the game
does mostly revolve around economics, but I've yet to see a system
with a full economic system that didn't work that way.

-- Dr. Pain (or was that Oleg?)


Main Index  |  Olympia  |  Arena  |  PBM FAQ  |  Links